This is another example that is interesting as we try to figure out what the heck is a culturally responsive practice. This would be an example of the more moderate to extreme form of the cultural relativist view—that a disability or mental illness is a social-cultural myth or determined by culture. For example, in the case of child abuse I sent a while back, if the culture does not view it as abuse, is it abuse? Sort of truth justified by consensus criteria. And of course- they cite Foucault- which is kind of funny- given he and the other deconstructionists were French.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354067X221131998

This paper proposes that the ‘oppressed’ have morphed to include the mentally ill. If the mentally ill now form part of the ‘oppressed’ population, it must be asked whom the oppressor is. According to the explicated participant discourses, institutionalized models of health (western medicine) as well as traditional models of health (indigenous medicine) oppress the mentally ill. Participant two described a ‘western medicine’ psychiatric hospital room that ‘actually looked like a prison room’. While participant five stated that in indigenous traditional healers’ shrines where the mentally ill are often ‘bounded like a dog or an animal’.

And starting to see more of this type of language also in our area but especially in international journals related to disability.

“epistemicide’ – the near complete replacement of Indigenous knowledge systems for the epistemological paradigm of the colonist” Also part of the decolonization stuff seeping into the field that poses science is a form of western oppression.

Not sure what to think of it all…but you all can help with that!

MDB